Gun defenders have feelings, too. Tread lightly, America
SAN DIEGO – Imagine you’re the parent of an elementary school child between the ages of 8 and 11. A week ago, you were planning to visit a national park on summer vacation. But then your life was destroyed by a horrendous act of violence. And now, instead, you’re planning to visit a local funeral home and pick out a miniature casket.
This nightmare has been brought to you by the American gun culture, whose appetite for pain and loss is insatiable.
We Americans sure do love our guns, don’t we? In fact with 77 children killed in school shootings since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012 – where 26 people were shot and killed, 20 of them children between the ages of 6 and 7 – you could say we love our guns to death.
All those boys and girls are gone. But not to worry. In this country of ours, the spirit of John Wayne lives on.
As the son of a cop, guns were part of my childhood. And when I got older, I was never hooked. I’ve never understood what I consider to be an unhealthy fascination with firearms.
I know grown men who don’t pay their child support but they’ll buy an AR-15 military style assault rifle for $1,200 – and then go back a few weeks later and buy another to complete the set.
You want to talk about mental illness. There is a psychosis in this country about how we see guns, and those who stockpile them have got it bad.
But do we Americans love our guns more than we love our children?
How about other people’s children? People like the good folks of Uvalde, Texas, a small town of about 16,000 people – 79% of whom are Latino – whose collective hearts are broken. This is the place where you’ll find Robb Elementary School, America’s most recent mass crime scene. It was there that 18 year-old Salvador Ramos – armed with an automatic handgun and a high-powered rifle – allegedly shot and killed 19 children and two teachers Tuesday after allegedly shooting his own grandmother in the face.
Some of the darlings of rightwing media – a cohort that like to tell the rest of us to “get over it” and not to be so easily offended – have found something they find offensive and can’t get over: the suggestion that their slavish devotion to the National Rifle Association makes them indifferent to the slaughter of children, if a high-impact firearm does the slaughtering.
One conservative who got his feelings hurt was podcaster and radio host Ben Shapiro. By the way, this is the same Ben Shapiro who likes to snark to his audience: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
On May 24, the day of the carnage, Shapiro put out a tweet calling “morally reprehensible” the implication that those who oppose more gun laws are “somehow in favor of mass shootings.” The next day, Shapiro said it was “despicably dishonest” for anyone to say that those who oppose gun laws “don’t care enough about slain children.”
Others on the right were triggered by President Joe Biden’s heartfelt remarks from the White House Tuesday night, in which he tapped into his one and only superpower. As the Empathizer-in-chief, Biden feels the country’s pain. In this case, he knows what it’s like to be a member of that special club that no one wants to join – of parents who have had to bury a child. Biden has buried two children, his daughter Naomi and his son Beau.
Fox News Host Tucker Carlson was so bothered by Biden’s comments that he accused the president of “desecrating the memory of recently murdered children with tired talking points of the Democratic Party, dividing the country in a moment of deep pain rather than uniting.”
Fox News Host Laura Ingraham was also hurt. She called Biden’s words “despicable” and said they reflected a politics that was “selfish.” Ingraham said that the president aimed to “exploit the massacre of innocent little kids in order to try to turn around (his) own sagging poll members.”
Such lovely people. I certainly didn’t intent to hurt their feelings. Who even knew they had any feelings to hurt?
Contact Ruben Navarrette at crimscribe@ icloud.com.